


Close For Comfort

by onward_came_the_meteors



Series: October 2020 Prompts [20]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, M/M, One Shot, POV Third Person, Stranded
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:41:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27119711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onward_came_the_meteors/pseuds/onward_came_the_meteors
Summary: When the Iron Man and War Machine suits break down in the middle of a forest, Tony and Rhodey are stuck on an impromptu camping trip.
Relationships: James "Rhodey" Rhodes & Tony Stark, James "Rhodey" Rhodes/Tony Stark
Series: October 2020 Prompts [20]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947679
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	Close For Comfort

**Author's Note:**

> Day 20 (wow how is it already day 20?!?!), for the prompt "lost"

“It’s broken.”

Tony dropped the helmet on the ground, splashing mud on his shoes in the process, but that was the least of his concerns at the moment.

Rhodey came from around his shoulder and peered down at it. “It can’t be broken. It’s an Iron Man suit.”

“Broken,” Tony repeated himself. He gave the helmet a half-hearted kick, but that obviously didn’t do anything, and kind of hurt his foot anyway.

He and Rhodey were standing in a clearing in the middle of a forest (well, it hadn’t been quite so large a clearing a few minutes ago; but two fully powered suits crashing down from out of the sky tended to change the topography at least a little bit—in the form of long burnt skid marks, upended bushes, and at least one tree that was leaning like the Tower of Pisa, to be precise) somewhere upstate, where a few hours earlier Iron Man and War Machine had been needed for yet another keeping-the-peace, protecting-the-free-world mission that  _ hopefully _ hadn’t been all that urgent.

Because considering how both the Iron Man and War Machine suits were currently slumped on the ground, completely dead… there would probably be a slight delay in any world-saving.

Tony glanced in a circle around him again, but there still wasn’t anything but trees. Trees and rocks and bushes and every other thing that made up a forest; and absolutely nothing that made up any of the places he wanted to be. Unfortunately, without working suits—or a working JARVIS; and the last thing JARVIS had said to him before he and Rhodey had plummeted out of the sky was “Sir, I believe we are entering a field of potential— _ CRCKERKE _ —” and then there had only been static and silence (From the suit, anyway. He might’ve been flying as Iron Man for over five years now, and Rhodey might’ve been in the Air Force for forever, but there was a kind of visceral, human-nature kind of response to discovering that instead of flying, you were now  _ falling at very fast speeds _ —and if that response wasn’t entirely the stoic and teeth-gritted one that people expected, so what).

Rhodey watched the Iron Man helmet finish rolling until it bumped against the War Machine helmet, before looking back up at Tony. “Okay, so let’s send out a signal with our coordinates.”

Tony shook his head. “Can’t do that when the suits are dead.”

“Okay… so we call someone.”

“I don’t have my phone.”

“How can you not have your phone?” Rhodey looked incredulous, which was highly unfair because out of everything else about this situation, this did not even number in the top eight.

Well, fine then, if he insisted on having this discussion. “My pants pockets aren’t big enough.”

“Maybe if you didn’t wear them so tight—”

“Do you have your phone, then?”

“Yes.”

“So why don’t you call someone?”

“Fine.” Rhodey rolled his eyes a barely perceptible amount—but Tony still perceived it—and pulled out his own cell phone from his pocket. He tapped the screen a couple times, and frowned. “Huh.”

“Please don’t say it.” Tony was rocking up and down on the balls of his feet, brimming with energy that had nowhere to go.

Rhodey said it anyway, shoving the phone back into his pocket. “It’s dead, too. Guessing whatever pulse just hit the suits took that out with it.”

Tony couldn’t help the frustrated sigh that blew out of him. He’d made himself Iron Man for a reason, dammit—because tech was supposed to  _ work _ , especially tech that he designed; that was the only thing he had going for him over Thor’s temperamental hammer of lightning and godly judgement. And now here they were, stuck in the middle of nowhere with the two lifeless helmets staring blankly up at them.

Tony and Rhodey looked at each other for a long moment.

Finally, Tony spoke. “Did you happen to check how far we were from the nearest town before the—?” He made a ball with his hands and exploded it outward.

“About four hundred klicks.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah, I’m not walking,” Rhodey said with a shake of his head. His head tilted briefly back up to the sky as he crossed his arms.

Tony nodded and plopped down into the mud. Then he decided he wasn’t really at the point of hopelessness where he wanted to be sitting in mud, and stood back up, brushing off his pants.

“Okay,” he said. “What are our options?”

Rhodey paused. “We don’t have a lot.”

“Hit me.”

“We have one.” Rhodey turned so that he was meeting Tony’s eyes.

Tony took a step backward, sending a few flecks of mud spraying onto the Iron Man suit, right at the spot where red paint met gold. “I don’t like that one. We are one dot in the middle of a fucking huge forest, and the chances that somebody’s going to think to check here for us if we just sit here—”

“—are better than if we go wandering off and get even farther away from where anyone will think to check for us,” Rhodey pointed out. He was using that voice he always used when he was right—a completely different voice than the one he used when he was only hoping Tony would think he was right ( _ cough  _ spring break of 1987). There was just the slightest difference in the way his shoulders were set and his eyes lined up with Tony’s own…

… and he was still talking. Tony blinked just as Rhodey was finishing up.

“—don’t want to drag the suits along with us, because correct me if I’m wrong, but both of them weigh over two hundred pounds.” Rhodey raised his eyebrows at that, and Tony wondered briefly if he’d caught him zoning out (was it really zoning out if he was still focused on  _ him _ —just not the precise words coming out of his mouth?) before he took in a slow breath, and Tony realized that he was just registering the gravity of their situation.

Which, yeah, was not ideal. In fact, Tony was pretty sure he’d had a dream about this exact type of scenario once (that had been after a  _ long _ mission), and once they got back home, he would be making some serious upgrades, because  _ really, no pulse should’ve been strong enough to break through the titanium alloy _ —but now that they were here, and this was happening, and they actually had to figure out a way to deal with it… well, it was almost like his brain relaxed, back into that familiar  _ here’s what we have to work with and here’s what we have to fix it into  _ pattern.

And while the Hippocratic Oath probably didn’t apply to superheroes, maybe he could make his own condensed version:  _ first, don’t fuck this up worse than you already have. _

Tony sighed. “Fine, we’ll stay put. I always wanted to go camping, anyway.” He started off toward the edge of the clearing, where a tree with particularly large roots was creaked up from the ground; and not that he was tired or anything, but those roots did look like a nice spot to sit down while he tried to remember everything he’d ever learned about the Eastern North American wilderness.

“That’s sarcasm, by the way!” he called over his shoulder in a few moments after Rhodey didn’t respond.

“Yeah, I got that!” Rhodey called back, and Tony couldn’t see his face, but he grinned anyway.

* * *

A few hours passed—how many hours, Tony didn’t know, but enough so that the sun was dipping below the parts of the horizon he could see through the thick growth of trees, and the sky above was washing a dark navy—and neither of them were grinning.

None of the worst-case scenarios that had been playing in his head (bears, storms, ambushes by enemies targeting his weak position and using it as an opportunity to eliminate Iron Man once and for all, raccoons) had actually happened (not yet, anyway), but there was still something about the not  _ knowing _ how long they were going to be there and whether anyone had even noticed they were gone and all those other cheery thoughts that tended to be the slightest bit of a downer.

No one could say they weren’t using their time wisely, though. The clearing had been dragged into a makeshift sort of campsite; the Iron Man and War Machine suits propped up against a stump like they were keeping watch over it all. A leaf had drifted from the branches above to settle on Iron Man’s head, and Rhodey had refused to blow it off.

At the moment, Rhodey was crouched in front of the carefully arranged pile of sticks that had just caught fire, orange and yellow crackling over whatever he was humming under his breath. Probably feeling Tony’s eyes on him, he lifted his head.

“What are you looking at?”

Tony glanced up. “The sky.” He could see some stars poking out of the dark blue up there now; teeny glowing pinpricks. Not a sight you saw all that often in either New York or Malibu.

Rhodey slid another twig into the fire. “Anything?”

“Nope.”

“Figures.” Rhodey watched the fire for another moment before he apparently determined that yes, it was still on fire, and continued. “We’ll probably get picked up tonight, tomorrow at the latest.”

“What are you basing that on?” 

“Previous experience.”

Tony was perched on top of a log, bracing his feet against a tree trunk that raised parallel to his head, but at that, he took his feet down and spun around so his whole body was facing Rhodey. “My previous experience is  _ you’re  _ the one who comes and finds me.”

A quick smile flashed across Rhodey’s face. “I’m also basing this on the fact that people will notice I’m missing if I don’t return any calls or messages or show up to places I’m supposed to be; instead of chalking it up to being an eccentric genius.”

“You know, I don’t actually care for that word,” Tony mused.

“Which one?” Oh, the sarcasm was heavy there, but Tony barely noticed as his attention was caught by something in the sky.

“Is that a cloud? That’s a cloud.”

“Yeah…” Rhodey spared the sky a glance before turning back to the fire.

“Is it supposed to rain tonight?”

“No.” Rhodey finally followed Tony’s gaze, squinting upward at the rapidly darkening sky. “Where are you even seeing this cloud?”

Tony pointed. “There.”

“That’s tiny. That’s like, barely even a cloud.” Rhodey paused and looked at Tony. “It’s not gonna rain.”

“It better not,” Tony muttered. He carefully slid his legs back up on the log. Tree bark scraped against his pants.

Rhodey was still looking at him, and looking like he wanted to say something, but after a few moments (of watching Tony pick moss off of his shoelaces and, really, there had to be more interesting things to do even here) he just shook his head. “You know, this isn’t even the weirdest situation you’ve ever gotten me in.”

Tony nearly fell off the log. “That  _ I’ve  _ gotten  _ you _ in? I’m not denying past transgressions, just to be clear, but you could’ve detected the energy field just as easily as I could.”

“Yeah, excuse me for being busy sending out a scan—”

“Right, of course you were.”

“—because I actually plan ahead before we get to where we’re supposed to be.” Rhodey leaned forward to grab another branch and snap it in half before tossing it into the fire, the sleeve of his shirt sliding up in the process.

Tony nodded, one up one down. “That’s interesting, because last time I checked I was the one who tracked down the right location in the first place.”

“JARVIS did that.”

“... point.” Tony watched another leaf fall down next to his leg. “Not that it does any good now.”

“We’ll be right back on the mission as soon as you get the suits back online,” Rhodey said. “It’s a setback, yeah, but we do those sometimes. We can handle it.”

“Yeah?” Tony let himself roll sideways off the log, landing with an “oof” on the soft ground on the other side of the fire. Man, he shouldn’t have blinked that last time—now that his eyes had felt what it was like to be closed, that was all they wanted to do. And it didn’t help that he was still a little sore from flying (and crashing). “Don’t suppose your wilderness-survival plan involves us getting any sleep tonight.”

“Just because I knew how to make a fire doesn’t mean I have a wilderness-survival plan,” Rhodey countered. “I’m just in the military.”

“I know how to start a fire,” Tony protested, stifling a yawn behind his hand.

“Trust me, I know you do,” Rhodey muttered. “Whether you can do it intentionally is the question.”

Tony grinned.

Rhodey cast a long, searching look around the clearing, lit by the fire that was sending a thin trail of smoke drifting up into the sky. Branches rustled and crickets chirped from somewhere under the leaves, but there didn’t seem to be signs of any kind of… well, any kind of anything. “I don’t see why we can’t go to sleep,” he finally decided. “As long as we keep waking up to check the fire, but it’s built high enough that it’ll take a while to burn out.”

Tony barely heard the rest of the sentence after “we can sleep” and slumped down onto the ground, letting his arm flop over his face. It was amazing how a stretch of dirt that had had the top layer of dirt scraped off was suddenly easier to sleep on than his luxury bed back in his mansion. “Perfect,” he said, and the word came out in half a sigh as Rhodey leaned back on the other side of the fire—being a lot more careful about how close he was to said fire than Tony was, but hey, it was chilly now that the sun had gone down—and folded his arms behind him like a pillow.

The snap of the branches in the fire and the low buzzing of assorted insects were the only sounds as Tony’s eyes drifted shut.

He was stuck in that haze of not-really-sleepy-enough-to-be-asleep, not-really-awake-enough-to-be-awake—where his brain was going a mile a minute while his limbs refused to move and his eyelids felt like they weighed a thousand pounds—for a few minutes as he tried to get settled.

The firelight glinted off the suits a few feet away, still positioned up against the stump. War Machine’s helmet had slid so that it was notched in the gap between Iron Man’s faceplate and his shoulder.

The circle of sky above them was gleaming dark, and there were so many stars. Seriously,  _ so many stars _ , and he might’ve tried to label them if he hadn’t been so tired that they blurred before his eyes.

Crickets. There were still those. He wasn’t sure how many. Definitely lots.

There was a pebble digging into his back. He dug it out and shuffled around until he was on his side. To his surprise, Rhodey was already facing him, their eyes lining up almost perfectly as Tony flopped the rest of the way over.

Rhodey’s eyes were open, firelight reflecting through the dark pupil. Tony shivered.

“It’s cold,” he said, barely a whisper in the night air.

“It is. Very cold,” Rhodey said, hardly a breath later.

“I don’t wanna make this weird.”

“Forget it. C’mon.”

If a rescue party were to happen upon them now, they would be greeted by the sight of Tony and Rhodey huddled together in front of the fire, folded about as close to each other as two people could get as the breeze blew chilly gusts that caused the flames to waver. There was no shelter, no cover, nothing but each other as Rhodey’s head pressed up against the crook of Tony’s neck and Tony’s leg shifted and twined around Rhodey’s. It was easy to fall asleep then, just like they had a million times back in college, back whenever one of them would stay over in between parties and conferences and tours, back when a mission would get particularly grueling and the days would start to blur together. Here, it was just as familiar as stepping into the suit… but a great deal warmer.

The rescue party didn’t come, not that night anyway; but even if it had, Tony didn’t think he would want to be disturbed.

**Author's Note:**

> Gonna be completely honest and say that I don't know whether Tony and Rhodey are meant to be romantic or platonic in this; I just see their relationship as being super close either way, so feel free to read it however it makes the most sense to you!  
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
